TBC: I wouldn't say I'm aphantastic. I _do_ visualize, but in some ways less well than seems to be typical. I am very mildly synesthesic [eg, just a hint of color while doing certain kinds of mathematics]. Others in the group were much more definite about both these.
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Did people report seeing colors specifically in mathematical structures? When I did a twitter survey specifically on this a year or two back, everyone said no, mathematical objects are “ghostly” or “transparent” and not really quite visual, so they don’t have colors.
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Yes, they did.
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Feynman's experience is, I suspect, not that unusual. Not as strong as this for me (& I think less of the actual graphemes), but related.
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Ah, yes, seeing notation in color is common. Also integers. (My spouse does this; you can say “what color is 536” and they’ll answer immediately. I think they just see it, they’re not working it out.)
I was thinking of abstract objects like a non-abelian group or something
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Oh, in that case: me. Though it's too strong. When I've been thinking hard about some type of objects, I start to get slight color (and other) associations with them. It's not chosen, and (I think) fairly repeated, i.e., the color doesn't change.
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Hard to describe because it's often _not_ especially visual (more spatial / kinesthetic, a kind of felt sense). And I rarely think much seriously about mathematics these days.
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Thanks! “Slightly colored but not really visual” is really interesting, and I think I know what you mean.
It’s probably been decades longer since I’ve thought seriously about mathematics than since you have! I’m running off of distant memories of experience here
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It's just an evoked sense. For instance, when working on this paper (arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0 ) I thought pretty hard for a while about some of the central objects. Enough that much of the core work was done on long walks.
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All hard core thinking is done on long walks [why?]
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hmm
i never tried taking long walks in grad school maybe that was the problem 🤔
You were at BERKELEY and you didn’t go for long walks???
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mea culpa! i was very depressed 🙃
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